The Associated Press uncovered extensive use of slave labor in the Thai seafood industry, which supplies major U.S. supermarkets, restaurants, and food suppliers, such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Sysco, Nestle, Whole Foods and Red Lobster. The investigation led to the freeing of more than 2,000 enslaved fishermen from Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, the jailing of perpetrators, congressional hearings and the proposal of new laws. The U.S. State Department used the series as part of its decision to give Thailand the lowest rating for human trafficking and has discussed the findings during diplomatic talks.
“‘Seafood from Slaves’ is investigative journalism at its best,” said Thomas E. Patterson, the Shorenstein Center’s interim director. “The story was extraordinarily difficult to uncover and its impact on people’s lives and public policy will last far into the future.”
Political Journalism in Comparative Perspective
Based on interviews with journalists, a systematic content analysis of political news, and panel survey data in different countries, this book tests how different systems and media-politics relations condition the contents of political news.
Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
Holzer shows us an activist Lincoln through journalists who covered him from his start through to the night of his assassination—when one reporter ran to the box where Lincoln was shot and emerged to write the story covered with blood. In a wholly original way, Holzer shows us politicized newspaper editors battling for power, and a masterly president using the press to speak directly to the people and shape the nation.
Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson, former chairman and CEO of CNN, former editor of TIME, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, and author of bestselling books on Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, received the 2016 Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism and delivered the keynote address, titled “Technology and Journalism.”
The Miami Herald examined how more than 500 children died of abuse or neglect over a seven-year period after falling through Florida’s child welfare safety net, largely as a result of a misguided effort to reduce the number of foster children while simultaneously slashing services for troubled families. The series prompted immediate reforms, including the most far-reaching overhaul of child welfare laws in Florida’s history.
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself
Andrew Pettegree investigates who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and journalists trustworthy; and people’s changed sense of themselves as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pettegree concludes, transmission of news had become so efficient and widespread that European citizens—now aware of wars, revolutions, crime, disasters, scandals, and other events—were poised to emerge as actors in the great events unfolding around them.
Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China
Daniela Stockmann argues that the consequences of media marketization depend on the institutional design of the state.
Marvin Kalb
Marvin Kalb is a distinguished journalist, author, and the founding director of the Shorenstein Center. Kalb’s journalism career included three decades of award-winning reporting for CBS and NBC News as chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press. Kalb is the Murrow Professor emeritus at Harvard Kennedy School and hosts The Kalb Report at the National Press Club. His 15th book, The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956—Khruschev, Stalin’s Ghost, and a Young American in Russia, was released in October 2017.
Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung, Buried by Law and Medicine
A year-long investigation by The Center for Public Integrity, in partnership with the ABC News Brian Ross investigative unit, examined how doctors and lawyers, working at the behest of the coal industry, helped defeat benefit claims of coal miners who were sick and dying of black lung disease. The team explored thousands of previously classified legal filings and created an original database of medical evidence that showed how prominent lawyers withheld key evidence and doctors at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, hired by the coal industry, consistently denied the existence of advanced black lung on X-rays. Following the online and network news reports, Johns Hopkins suspended its black lung program, U.S. senators began crafting reform legislation and members of Congress called for a federal investigation.
How Partisan Media Polarize America
Drawing on experiments and survey data, Matthew Levendusky shows that Americans who watch partisan programming do become more certain of their beliefs and less willing to weigh the merits of opposing views or to compromise. And while only a small segment of the American population watches partisan media programs, those who do tend to be more politically engaged, and their effects on national politics are therefore far-reaching.
